My Morning Walk

So today I finally got around to doing what I dreamed I would do in this house: I walked around the garden in the morning, with a cup of coffee in my hand, after loading my son onto the school bus. I was lured to the garden and away from the constant call of work by the sound of woodpeckers working a dead tree in the far back of my property. I easily sighted them, two red-crowned pileated woodpeckers, flinging their heads at the tree with alarming force, causing shards of bark to fall away, revealing the tree’s sweet meat (and the galleries of ants therein).

The quiet joy that consumes me is indescribable.

My heart is overfull in trying to talk about how enormous this shift, this moving here to Garrison and its trees and solitude and grace and glory, has been to me. Every day I start a post in my head, but I stop because I want to tell the story right, but I think it’s time for me to start thinking like Monet and allow my posts to be more pointillistic. I have so much I want to share.

Here is my garden this morning:

And here is a handful of tomatoes I picked this morning, a pure bonus, as they were not planted by me:

These simple, simple things make me feel profoundly grateful and alive in the most pressing and poignant way.

I will tell more stories, I will. But for now I am still too full to share.

About stacy

I am a writer, author, mother, former magazine editor (last at Redbook), optimist, and, above all, a searcher. I'm still searching for whom I'm really meant to be, after a series of very jarring losses: a divorce and house disaster that led to a book (Falling Apart In One Piece); a week after the book came out, my parents suddenly fell gravely ill, I resigned from my job (and, apparently, my career), my son went into crisis, my parents then rapidly died four weeks apart, and my boyfriend (who had moved in with me and my son just weeks before the book came out) began the painful journey of realizing we couldn't make our relationship work (that story unfolded on this blog). Since then I've been trying to figure out what's next. Or, in other words, how to fill in the blanks.